


Objections

by lonelywalker



Category: Close to Home
Genre: Age Difference, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:20:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I think they lived to fight with each other. Conflict <i>was</i> their relationship."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Objections

_"I think they lived to fight with each other. Conflict **was** their relationship."  
\- Annabeth Chase, "A House Divided"_

He works longer hours than she does. After a week of phone calls that never seem to connect, of running into each other only by coincidence, she's forced to give him a key. It's not Jack's key, but, somehow, avoiding any significance makes it worse.

The key only makes things better by degrees. She still goes to bed alone, wakes up to find him gone, his laundry in a bag he'll take home at the weekend. She may sleep with him, but she draws the line at washing his boxer-briefs, or trying to get the ink stains out of his shirt. Laundry, like meeting the parents, is far too serious a step to even consider.

If she's lucky, she'll find him in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, combing his hair for the tenth time. He gets a haircut once a week. She half-remembers the shaggy days of court cases past, and wonders what personal issues had kept him from the barber.

Offering him breakfast is far too domestic, and she's mostly worried about Haley in those moments before they leave the house. She's thankful for the responsibility. It's more than a good excuse.

She has to wonder if he does it on purpose, if he's always worked so late. Maybe he's only trying to prove a point. He's a seasoned professional, and she's a young single mother. They both have their distractions. He has his excuses, too.

She's most scared of Sunday mornings, when he's more than just a lingering memory of warm arms around her as she sleeps. He sits at the kitchen table and pulls faces at Haley as she giggles and spits out cereal.

She really should ask him to stop.

 

Doug tries to break up with her over sugar-free peach-mango sodas in the park. She has the tingling taste of saccharine on her tongue as she tries to understand what he wants. What _she_ wants.

"I don't want to be one of those serial daters," she tells him. "I don't want Haley to grow up getting attached to one guy for a few months, and then he's suddenly gone because we broke up and he's not really her father. I don't want to put her through that."

"Sometimes you have to take risks, Annabeth."

She wants to ask him which risks he's taking, and whether he's intending to retreat to his twice-monthly relationship with a perpetually distant and quite possibly mythical girlfriend.

He shifts on the bench as a pair of rollerbladers glide past, and he reiterates his perfectly reasonable argument about why he should return the key and forget that any of this ever happened. They're both adults, after all. This doesn't have to affect their friendship, or their careers.

This must be how Doug manages to represent murderers and rapists with a clear conscience. A selective memory is obviously standard issue for any defense lawyer.

"I will never love you the way he loved you," Doug tells her quietly. "And you will never love me the way you loved him."

If there's any time to ask him to stay, to decide that things really should get serious, it's now.

But Doug is a good fifteen years older than either of her parents, and she still doesn't want to do his laundry.

 

He moves in when there's a thick covering of autumn leaves on her lawn, and others are mushed into a slippery brown paste on the path leading to her door. A neighbor's kid had said he would come by with a rake, but she doubts it'll ever happen. And Doug... Well, Doug really isn't the outdoors type.

She'd spent a week, a long week, going through Jack's things, mailing some to his parents and sister, giving some to charity, boxing up the rest to store in the garage.

Doug is far more self-contained than Jack ever was. He's not so creative or exuberant. The room doesn't fill with that easy charm Jack used to display so effortlessly.

His books are mostly familiar ones although he argues that the notes and annotations and doodles in the margins are the true value of any volume. His closet is full of suits.

She has to wonder if he had burned all of his old belongings after his divorce, that well-fought battle that had no true victors. She keeps her photographs on the walls, and resolves to take some of him. He needs to smile more.

He's good with Haley, so good that Annabeth has to remind herself that, whatever she does, Haley is never going to remember Jack. And, whatever he does, Doug is never going to replace him.

Haley fiercely objects the first time Doug scoops her up in his arms to take her to kindergarten (Annabeth has an early meeting, and Doug makes his own schedules). She's crying when she gets there, and Annabeth finds a concerned message on her cell from a staff member, inquiring about the strange man who had deposited her at the door.

"He's my... my partner," Annabeth explains. Then: "We live together."

When she goes to check the rest of her messages, there's an apology from Doug. "I love you," he says at the end - quickly, thoughtlessly, as if purely out of habit.

_When I have a good day, I still catch myself picking up the phone to call her._

Later, when he's inside her, when she's rough and wet, rocking against his hand, she murmurs, "Love you too."

If he hears, she can always tell him that she was thinking about Jack.

 

She's embarrassed by him.

Not in public - he's always immaculately groomed and well-spoken, and his manners are perfect - but in her mind there is too much that seems too sensitive to touch.

She should have told Conlon months ago, should have come clean with it when it was nothing, just a kiss under duress that would have seemed perfectly easy to explain away.

She would have seemed honest, then. Professional. But it's been months, now. She's sleeping with a man who could almost be her grandfather. She's living with him. It's bit much to forget to mention.

"I'm seeing Doug Hellman," she tells him early one morning, before anyone else has a chance to trade on his day's supply of goodwill.

Four words, and they still come in a rush. Doug doesn't have to explain himself to anyone, and he's the one with the prize, after all. Dating a twentysomething woman must be quite a coup. She's sure his friends are impressed.

God knows what Conlon thinks of her. She can guess. But his tone is cool and measured. "As long as Hellman clears any conflict of interest with his clients, there's no ethical dilemma." He looks at her pointedly. "But I'd feel happier if your files stayed in your office. I don't want another Marinetti affair."

Marinetti, a prosecutor, had stumbled onto crucial evidence left out for him by his then-girlfriend, the defense attorney Kelly Joffe. Doug had kept their secret longer than Marinetti had. They had both trusted him with their careers. But Annabeth has no idea whether he might go snooping through her cases. Doug's contorted sense of right and wrong rarely references the ethical decisions of the Indiana Bar.

"Can I trust you?" she asks one evening as they sit and watch _Law & Order_ reruns, idly playing footsie in their socks.

"I can't tell you to trust me, Annabeth," he says in that laughing, sing-song tone of his. She can tell when he's smiling even when he's not in the room.

She cries during a dream that night and, when he wakes her, she tells him that it was only about werewolves bearing illegal search warrants. He laughs, but neither of them go back to sleep.

 

Snow is thick on the ground when they're assigned their first case together - almost identical phone calls in the early morning lead to a hazy conversation about who should take care of Haley before heading into the office.

They both go, each holding a tiny gloved hand, pretending that there's no tension between them. There are more tears when Doug leaves, now, than when he's with her. He's not Dad, but he's "Ug", and Haley and "Ug" both seem happy enough about that.

Sometimes Annabeth catches them looking at photographs together, Doug pointing out Grandma and Grandpa and Daddy in pictures that are already two years old. She tells the same stories to both of them, about summer dances and blushing flirtations and the houses that Jack built. For a while, Haley must think that her Daddy climbed beanstalks and killed giants for a living, but that's more than okay. She knows that Doug understands.

Doug likes to argue. She likes to argue with him, particularly when she knows she's right, particularly when there's a judge and jury present to tell her that she's right. But, now and again, she finds herself smiling at Doug's glee when he wins a point of order, when he springs up so quickly to object that he knocks his glasses off the table.

Arguments are so much more fun when they're impersonal.

The case pleads out by Christmas and, even though neither of them is particularly happy, there is sufficient goodwill and harmony in the world for them to go to Jim Conlon's New Year's Eve party as a couple.

"I will never love you the way he loved you," Doug tells her after midnight. "And you will never love me the way you loved him. But I do love you. And I want to try."

 

In the Spring, she phones her parents, and asks when they might be visiting.  



End file.
